46 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 22, 2014
of elk, but it is nonetheless a feat worthy
of documentation. GoPro's o ering
price, of twenty-four dollars a share, val-
ued the company at around three billion
dollars. Woodman's father, Dean Wood-
man, a hale gent of eighty-five who had
himself once been a very successful en-
trepreneur, as a founder of the now de-
funct San Francisco investment bank
Robertson Stephens, and who early on
had lent his son two hun-
dred thousand dollars to
finance GoPro, came up to
him and said, "You look
like a rock star."
"I play one on TV," the
son said. He is known as
the Mad Billionaire, for his
hyperactive antics and taste
for adventure sports. But
when it came time for him
to talk, just before the
opening, he teared up, presumably at this
culmination of so much hard work---
years of risks rewarded, doubts dashed,
overpromises met, and paternal expecta-
tions exceeded. He recovered himself for
the cameras. "I'm fired up!" he called out
to his employees. "You fired up?"
After the bell, while the GoPro em-
ployees milled around and posed for
photos, Brad Schmidt, GoPro's creative
director, working on a laptop with
GoPro editing software, quickly cut the
footage into a packet to present to the
TV producers who'd be interviewing
Woodman and his fellow-executives
throughout the day. As Schmidt has
said, you don't hunt shots; you "capture"
them. (This approach requires lots of
work in the cutting room, or what
Surfing called "a time-warping pain in
the edit-ass.") Schmidt scrolled through
dozens of vantages, many of them im-
bued with a kinetic intensity you don't
usually see on the set of a stock-market
show. "The button shot is amazing," he
said; it had captured Woodman reach-
ing down toward the camera to press a
lit panel that would initiate the day's
trading---the NASDAQ equivalent, per-
haps, of getting tubed at Pipeline.
As he worked, half a dozen guests
held their GoPros up to the window to
film the Jumbotrons in Times Square,
which NASDAQ had leased for the occa-
sion in order to display GoPro videos.
Among the cavalcade of images was an
underwater shot of Woodman's toddler
son learning to swim: a private event
now magnified into mythology in the
hall of mirrors that is our world of cam-
eras and screens.
Woodman had the good fortune to
invent a product that was well
suited to a world he had not yet imag-
ined. The ripening of the technology in
his camera, after a half decade of tinker-
ing, coincided with the
fruition of broadband and
the emergence of You-
Tube, Facebook, and other
social-media platforms for
the wide distribution of
video. GoPro rode the
wave. What might have
been just another cam-
corder became a leading
connector between what
goes on in the real world
and what goes out in the virtual one---a
perfect instrument for the look-at-me
age. Its charm lies perhaps in its subli-
mated conveyance of self, its sneaky
tolerable narcissism. GoPro footage is
related to the selfie, in its "Here I
am" (or "was") ethos, and its wide view
and variety of mounts often allow the
filmmaker to include himself, or some
part of himself, in the shot. But because
it primarily points outward it's a record
of what an experience looks like, rather
than what the person who had the ex-
perience looked like when he stopped
afterward and arranged his features into
his pretested photo face. The result is
not as much a selfie as a worldie. It's
more like the story you'd tell about an
adventure than the photo that would
accompany it.
Though GoPro is known primarily
for its connection to adventure sports,
the camera is increasingly used in fea-
ture films and on TV, and by profes-
sionals of many stripes---musicians,
surgeons, chefs. Many BMWs now
come with an app to control a GoPro in
the dash (in case you want to show the
kids your commute). The company has
been promoting its use in broadcasting
traditional sports. An armada of Go-
Pros greatly enhanced the coverage of
last year's America's Cup, in San Fran-
cisco Bay, but perhaps they'd shed less
light on the mysteries of an N.F.L. line
of scrimmage: one imagines indeci-
pherable grunting and rustling, the
filmic equivalent of a butt dial. The op-
posite of this, and the big thing these
days, is the footage that comes from
mounting GoPros on small quadcopter
drones: sublime sweeping shots and
heretofore unseen bird's-eye vantages,
on the cheap.
As for its broadcast applications, we
are still in a relatively primitive stage. A
GoPro senior producer described to me
the process he came up with last year to
get P.O.V. footage of Shane Dorian
surfing the giant waves at Mavericks, o
the coast of Northern California, to use
on a broadcast of a competition there.
After Dorian had ridden a wave, a guy
on a Jet Ski would zoom over, grab the
camera, and then carry it in past the
break to a paddleboarder, who'd maneu-
ver through the swirling whitewash to
the base of a cli , over which a member
of the broadcast team had lowered a
basket. Up went the basket, and an as-
sistant ran the camera over to the broad-
cast tent.
In going public, GoPro has tried to
position itself not just as a camera-maker
but as a media company---a producer
and distributor of branded content. In
this conception, it is hawking not only
cameras and accessories (the source, up
to now, of pretty much all of GoPro's
revenue) but videos, too (a source, up to
now, of pretty much no revenue). In the
past five years, videos posted by GoPro
have attracted half a billion views. On
the GoPro channel on YouTube, videos
average about half a million viewers
each. The company thinks it can capi-
talize on the fact that thousands of peo-
ple every day post videos online and,
without prompting, tag them as GoPro.
Most of them are not the ones that
come from their sponsored athletes
(or "brand ambassadors"), like Aaron
Chase, who are expected to submit foot-
age. They are crowdsourced---ama-
teur-hour finds that turn pro. For the
latter, GoPro pays very little---maybe
some accessories or a camera, plus, say, a
thousand dollars for the first million
views. A cadre of editors at GoPro
scours Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit
and often reëdits the best and pushes
them out on its own channels on You-
Tube, Pinterest, and other platforms. In
the process, the company has nurtured a
growing army of amateurs (eager pro-
viders of free content) and helped the